The lex Valeria and Sulla’s empowerment as dictator (82-79 BCE)

Abstract

In November 82 BCE, the victorious proconsul L. Cornelius Sulla (cos. 88) revived the dictatorship to restore law and order in the battered Republic. L. Valerius Flaccus (cos. 100), then princeps senatus, was appointed interrex by the patrician patres. After obtaining the necessary clearances from the Senate and the augural college, Flaccus passed a law ordering him to appoint Sulla to an unprecedented dictatura legibus scribundis et rei publicae constituendae, and himself to the office of magister equitum, and this ad tempus incertum, until the completion of their vast commission. Although Sulla was thus invested with a series of spectacular extraordinary powers, he still scrupulously bothered to involve SPQR in the execution of his momentous political programme. Probably yet before the comitia consularia of 81, Sulla next initiated a gradual and carefully staged return to normalcy. The cornerstone of this policy was his decision to run the Republic in 80 as consul II, in conjunction with Q. Caecilius Metellus Pius. Its climax was Sulla’s dramatic abdication of the dictatorship at the outset of 79, proclaiming that he had now fully restored the Republic.